What a simple card on a shelf can tell you.

I was attending a friend’s wedding recently in Austin, Texas and stayed at an up-market hotel just outside the City. As usual there was the ubiquitous note in the bathroom asking for my help in saving the planet. You know the one; “a towel on the floor means please replace and a towel on the rail means I will use it again.” As usual, this always prompts me to take a quick look at the hotel to see what efforts they are making themselves. In the case of the country club it was almost zero; incandescent bulbs were burning away in the light sockets, the air conditioning and lights all ran 24x7 even if I was out of the room and so on. Immediately, the request for help in saving the world was reduced to being nothing more than a profit maximising exercise in my eyes.

Normally I leave it there. All hotels make the same request and we all know that in 99% of cases it is a plea to reduce their laundry bill and has almost nothing to do with any desire to improve the health of the planet. However, in the country club in question, they really managed to offend my sensibilities in a new way. On the table in my room were two bottles of mineral water available for purchase (all I had to do was open them) that proudly bore the label “Fiji”. (The fact a small bottle was priced at $8.50 and wasn’t even in the fridge is worth its own blog entry.)

The debate about bringing water half way across the planet in a plastic bottle is not new. The almost cynical messaging by hotels that they are somehow “green” and their constant appeals to our environmental consciousness to do our bit in a way that just coincidently happens to lower their operating costs is annoying. However, the country club in question really took things to a new level.

The appeal card in question was printed in full colour and then laminated. The front had a short statement to the effect that “we did not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we have it on loan from our grandchildren”. On the back, below the appeal to save on their laundry costs were details of a series of awards they had won over the previous 2 decades for their environmental efforts. These included actions such as recycling water to use on the golf courses and so on.

As a marketer I was pained by their complete inability to understand that any claim you make on behalf of your brand has to be credible. They had worked their message up into a nice card, added some substantiating proof points to support their claims and then placed the card in the middle of the most environmentally unfriendly room I have stayed in for several years.

It was obvious; they have employed a reasonably skilled marketing person who knows how to do their marketing job but, that person is clearly quite low in rank within the organisation and is unable to really get the company aligned behind the brand values they want to push. The company doesn’t believe its own marketing hype.

All that from a simple card on the bathroom shelf!